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New Scientist Live

Metal asteroid and Trojans selected for next NASA missions

SwRI and SSL/Peter Rubin

By Lisa Grossman

Asteroids ahoy. NASA just announced the destinations for its next low-cost space ventures: the Trojan asteroids that flank Jupiter and the large metallic asteroid 16 Psyche. Both targets will reveal secrets of the early solar system.

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Lucy, scheduled to launch in October 2021, will arrive at a main belt asteroid in 2025, and continue on to Jupiter in 2027. Over the following six years, it will explore six Trojan asteroids, which orbit at the same distance from the sun as Jupiter in gravity wells on either side of the gas giant. The Trojans are thought to be remnants from an earlier period of the solar system’s history, and so could hold clues as to how the planets formed.

Psyche will launch to explore its namesake asteroid in October 2023 and arrive in 2030. 16 Psyche appears to be made mostly of iron and nickel rather than rock, which suggests it might be the core of a small rocky world that survived a collision with another planet or asteroid.

“16 Psyche is the only known object of its kind in the solar system, and this is the only way humans will ever visit a core,” principle investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton at Arizona State University in Tempe said in a statement. “We learn about inner space by visiting outer space.”

Discovery-class missions are relatively cheap – capped at $450 million – and have previously included the Messenger mission to Mercury, the Dawn mission to asteroids Vesta and Ceres, and the InSight Mars lander scheduled to launch in 2018.

“This is what Discovery Program missions are all about – boldly going to places we’ve never been to enable groundbreaking science,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, in a statement.